Napoleonics in the age of technology and streaming

I think Kevin, its your natural tendency to block the opinions and views of your subordinates

I think the music could be a bit quieter and the game sound a bit louder. It seems weird to see charge and countercharge going on to complete silence.

I think we all agree the battle on Feb, 25 was quite a spectacle.  We were certainly feeling it at the end.  I think the footage from the stream ended up really good.  I (briefly) forgot to switch back to the live screen after the first restart.  That lasts for maybe 20 minutes.  Interestingly the moment I remember to turn to capturing the right scene again my forces are nearly in the same position they were when we crashed so that kind of worked out but not really.

There was a lot of action on my side.  A great line battle, some really courageous assaults made by infantry, and an angry bit of cavalry fighting.  I've only made my way about half way through watching so far but I've been writing down some notes and time stamps of some interesting, funny, or just entertaining moments.  If we can timestamp any moments worth highlighting it'd be way easier for an edit.  I was thinking I might try to botch together some kind of highlights/trailer thing.  Whenever the day comes that I've finished the profile and everything and actually start 'for reals this time' it'd be nice to have a trailer or something to point to for some clips of what to expect.  Something like from the PvP battle on Sunday where I write a note to Kevin saying "I hope Phil doesn't get lost in the woods."  and then we can cut to us talking about Miko's diversion with a zoom in on the replay where it shows Phil's division miles from the objective.  

Moments for pay attention for on Feb 25:
00:11:00 (ish) - Multiple people agree "PvP is the best!"     ->  XX:XX:XX (Don't have timestamp yet) - Everyone at the end of the game going "Ohh make it stop.  I don't want to be on this ride anymore!"

00:44:00 - Just a weird coincidence where Martin says to prepare for "general chaos"   ->  2:XX:00 I revel in the chaos I have sown over Kevin's center-right.  Just funny that we both used the phrase

1:30:00 (ish) - Battle begins and gradually escalates


1:42:00 - A single battalion managed to attack while the rest of the brigade hung back.  They were screwed by the time I noticed them, but I did all I could to make their sacrifice worth something.  I think it ended up being a pretty important moment to move those guns back.  At least from my perspective it felt important.

1:54:00 - At this time I notice the infantry reserves Kevin is deploying to his left.  What is really interesting is I don't think I noticed them until I made the comment. Interestingly some 10 minutes or so before I notice the troops in the back moving I had already ordered the "surprise attack on the guns", which with those reserves committed elsewhere meant the attack on the guns (Kevin's right) wouldn't get any help.  I think I was just getting desperate and given the objectives and the situation I just figured sitting back and fighting with arty from the worse position wasn't really an option.  It was a just bit lucky that the timings worked out like that.

1:59:00 - The brutal attack over the pile of fallen brothers in arms.  I think this marks the start of a very bloody line battle.

That was all the further I got so far.  I think things went really well apart from the bit after the crash where I always forget to switch scenes.  And the audio was just the opposite of last time.  This time the music was too quiet, the game a bit too loud, and my voice was trapped in between.

I wasn't very happy with the scenario. An attack/defend situation is extremely tricky to balance because of how SOW plays. The attackers probably needed 4 divisions and 4 players to the defenders 3 and 3. In this game a defender can also react to an unexpected thrust much too quickly; a Frederickan oblique attack would fail almost every time.

Perhaps just altering the victory conditions would account for that though? The allies had a pretty hard fight over the town, nearly getting it in the end, but we could also have been a bit more aggressive and gotten it I think. Also knowing the victory conditions when Kevin had pulled back I was a lot more content to just sit back and wait, since there didn't seem much point to only getting 1 objective. With retrospect, and a sample size of only 1, maybe if the objectives for attackers were minor victory for attackers to hold even 1 objective, major victory to hold both. That way the defenders have to protect both points while the attackers can focus on one. At the end of the day any scenario that ends with both forces mauling 50% of the other in a huge bloody fight was still a fun scenario. Sometimes the impossible attack order is given from higher up and you have no choice but to carry it out. At least we have the fortune of being able to survive those suicidal attacks.

Great game, fellas.

IMO, I think it was a good, balanced, scenario and could have gone either way.

It was a bold decision to stay south of the river with all forces, despite a nice hill to defend. A retreat for either of your Divisions would have made it a trap for the others.

All defended amazingly well, and against greater numbers but there was one phase, when I was supporting Miko's attack, where a little more co-ordination and a little luck might have split your line and communication with Phil (assuming that was taking place )

My main dilemma was how much force to divert to support Miko, as I was wary of my left because I couldn't see what Phil had behind the hill. In retrospect, I should have pushed my brigades harder in the first attack and even supported it with heavy Cav.

Unfortunately, Miko forgot about one of his Heavy cav brigades, which might have been something to do with the OOB issue earlier. Whatever the reason, they would have been useful early on.

Ehey, the stream was great. Had you given your men Benzedrine for the initial attack? . Exciting viewing. It must have taken nerves of steel to stand up firmly to those big battalions of Austrian Grenadiers. Little wonder that Kevin retired back behind the river later on. I expect he moved on from Iced-Tea to something stronger with ice:)

I'd say, maybe one for the Pat folder but the live stream makes that difficult now.

I promise not to watch that one then lol

I meant to bring it up on Tuesday but I done forgot: Is there a way to adjust the field of view at all? Most, if not all, RTS's don't usually bother with FOV settings because you can just zoom the camera back typically. However given the way we play it actually would be quite useful, and specifically for recording/viewing purposes I feel like the ability to have a bit more of what's in front of me actually on screen would probably make it a bit easier on the brain of the viewer to not have to try and keep a mental picture of what's going on. I've been trying to get a bit better at finding a middle ground between commanding and filming. I usually like to command on the front lines so my orders are received quicker, but that typically means only the enemy OR my force is on the screen at any one time so I've been trying to keep a good view in mind. Even then sometimes I'll order a brigade somewhere, and then I have to ride off before there's any visual fulfillment of my orders to go deal with another situation, or sometimes I pan the camera around a bit too quickly and it becomes disorienting for a viewer. As the player it's a bit easier to know what's going on even if it's off screen since I'm keeping mental tabs on everything, but the viewer doesn't quite get that luxury.

I don't know what the current FOV is at. It's only something I really notice in an first person shooter where I feel very tunnel visioned if it's too low. I think the existing FOV could probably stand to be increased a little without it going all fish-eye lens but it's hard to know for sure. If there was a little bit more on screen in the 'peripheral vision' so to say it might help give a better picture of what's going on and make it easier for the viewer to fill in the blanks with their mental picture. Though I don't really know a whole lot about coding and stuff so it might not be possible, or it might force all clients to have the same FOV and I wouldn't want to impose settings on others.

I think the FOV is set when the screen resolution is selected and there is no way to change it.

Seems a very good idea to me, Ehey.
So please don't trust the word of our favourite Tatar saboteur.
Try opening the in-game console (on my keyboard layout, it's done by pressing the '@' key).
Once the '>' prompt shows up, write setfov:FOV_VALUE and press enter.
I tried setting FOV_VALUE up to 120 (setfov:120) and the perspective projection is adjusted as one would expect.

Another thing worth considering imho would be redirecting the courier messages into a sort of scrolling text widget.
Because it often happens I get distracted for a short moment and once I realize a message window popped up in game, you're about to close it.
I had to imagine the sense of many of them until the next day.
Now I'm a bit busy, but I'll probably take a look inside and see if it's doable.
Provided you keep the streaming activity running on, of course.

Ciao.

By Jove, he's right. On American keyboards use the '~' key to get to the console prompt.

2 times a day clocks are too...

Thanks for the tip R59! I definitely am guilty of closing those messages way too soon. It's just such a reflex at this point, but I am trying to remember to leave them up a little. Maybe I should point them out a little more as well.

Try opening the in-game console (on my keyboard layout, it's done by pressing the '@' key).
Once the '>' prompt shows up, write setfov:FOV_VALUE and press enter.
I tried setting FOV_VALUE up to 120 (setfov:120) and the perspective projection is adjusted as one would expect.

I had no idea this was a thing... at all.... Brilliant!

I definitely am guilty of closing those messages way too soon. It's just such a reflex at this point, but I am trying to remember to leave them up a little. Maybe I should point them out a little more as well.

Ditto from me. 99.999% of the time I'm not watching any of this live so I miss the message and have to rewind slightly to catch it.
I know this is still early days but timestamps for some of the highlights would be great as well.

Trust me, if I was around to watch it live I would be playing it with you

Just a quick update on this thread since Microsoft has backed out of Mixer I am going to switch to YouTube. This has the advantage of saving the video forever as well so that actually works out alright. I've been admittedly quite lazy since the announcement of the end of Mixer as I also figured I'd take the switch as an opportunity to try and improve the appearance of everything.

Here is a link for where you can access the YouTube channel. I hope to be live for Tuesday and back on track. I have also updated the links in the first post in this thread just in case someone stumbles upon it.

I think YT is a better place for the streams, but is it possible to increase the resolution to 1080? I think the game deserves a crisper image.

I think YT is a better place for the streams, but is it possible to increase the resolution to 1080? I think the game deserves a crisper image.

past several weeks I've been working on my streaming/recording set up... 1080p requires quite a lot of upstream bandwidth, so unless Ehey's got beast of a connection I wouldn't recommend streaming at this resolution... it may be doable but overall quality will suffer...
Now recording is different as the only concern here is the file size and spikes in bitrate are allowed, so more options for encoding are available, actually too many. The size just needs to be reasonably small so it won't take a half day to upload into youtube...

Indeed the resolution is a difficult problem to solve.  I have a limited knowledge of all the mechanics and processes behind streaming beyond the rudimentary stuff needed to make it work at all.  Currently I think the situation with the resolution is on two counts.  The first being the bandwidth.  I get around 5 Mbps up which is the top of the range suggested if you're streaming 720p, but the bottom of the range suggested if you're streaming 1080p.  The second potential bottleneck for 1080p streaming is my hardware.  I need to do some more testing and fiddling, but part of my problem when I tried streaming 1080p before was the encoding of it may have been reaching the limits my processor can handle.  Knowing SOW was a CPU heavy game (even though it only uses 1 core in MP I think) I enabled an encoding option to encode with the GPU instead.  I did this at the same time I switched to 720p though, so it's possible that bandwidth wasn't the problem, and switching the encoding was enough.

I can think of one option of at the moment without spending 2 hours googling it which would be to decrease the FPS of the stream.  It's a bit of an old trick from back when streaming was in its infancy and the internet wasn't what it was today.  Currently it's 30 FPS @ 720p, but lowering it would save some bandwidth to try and cram some more pixels in there.  I would guess putting it below 20-25 would make too much negative impact but on the other side seeing as how the game hardly gets 60 FPS in MP it may be a solution.

Edit: After brief testing it seems YouTube actually prefers 8Mbps for 1080p, and also seems to force its own encoding upon me and takes it out of my hands. I've reached my corporate oppression quota for the day.

If you get around 5Mbps then you are stretching it already by streaming 720p. The rule of thumb is to use about half of your upstream. The reason is - you need some of it to play your game. Some people think if they have 50Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream then they can watch netflix, play game, stream etc. same time... not really - these numbers are co-related if you use half of your upstream then roughly speaking you cut your downstream by half as well... provided that you don't share your connection then you may try something like 3500kbps.
You're right that going below 30fps is not a good idea. The game stutters sometimes at less than 10fps - but I think it's because of some sync mechanism.
It is always better to have more fps than max of your output... although, ideal situation is that you've got solid 60 or 30 fps on output and stream with same or number that your output is divisible by... (so gamers that play at 144fps are advised to cap it to 120fps and stream at 60fps - but you really need both monster rig and internet which cost massive $$$) - cut the story short - for SoW it's safe to stay at 30fps for streaming.
Which encoders to use depends on your hardware of course - I watched tons of videos and read OBS and other forums for guide and the number of contradicting opinions is stunning. There are people saying that NVENC wipes floor with x264 and vice versa... or that one is for streaming other for recording... I don't have clear answer as I still do testing but it does depend on many factors and your particular hardware.

I noticed on the YT video that at times the image was quite broken up. The 720 res didn't feel consistent. Its a shame because the game looks very good and I suspect people won't, these days, watch videos at that resolution any more.

I noticed on the YT video that at times the image was quite broken up. The 720 res didn't feel consistent.

as this is just saved stream it will always suffer from limitations that live streaming puts on quality... you can compare my videos on YT which are uploaded recordings - the recent ones are in 1080p, just make sure you do switch the resolution in YT settings as this may auto default to lower resolution - YT seem to re-encode upon or during the upload the video to lower resolutions so it's available for slower or capped internet connections... you can also check on my twitch streams and try to assess different quality as I'm sure I'd be using different settings to Ehey...

Another thing on the resolution issue is I remember reading an article about the topic and I recall that it's actually even advised not to stream at 1080 unless you have Partner on Twitch or have some kind of advanced bitrate thing. Apparently if you put out 10,000 bits per second for a 1080 stream, the people watching the stream also need to be able to pull down 10,000 bits per second or they will suffer stutters and bad quality. This doesn't sound too significant but anyone watching on a phone or a weaker internet will probably struggle to get that number and for that reason I think a lot of streaming guides recommend 720.

I noticed on the YT video that at times the image was quite broken up. The 720 res didn't feel consistent.

I think this is partly also due to YT's control of the encoding processes. I noticed it too. Things did look blurrier than I seem to remember the Mixer stream looking. I've poked a few buttons so we'll see if this becomes any clearer on Friday. I watched Miko's stream and it definitely looked sharper than mine. If that fails I can consider also recording at possibly a higher resolution and then just having to upload the recording. This is a very un-optimal solution though. One of the biggest conveniences of streaming is not having to do all that video stuff to upload as well as not having it occupy my hard drive. It does seem like the recording would be the best way to go for 1080 footage

I also only just remembered an idea I think Grog had had about two people streaming and showing each other's. It wouldn't be too difficult to set it up to stream a Picture in Picture of another stream. I'm not sure if this would impact the bandwidth a lot or not. It would also be possibly useless depending on how small the added frame was going to be. Especially if its my stream in only 720 and then its pushed into a small box it might be hard to understand what's happening there. But it might be wort a try and could be a fun thing, especially if we put Miko and I in a division or corps together then we'd likely be near each other and the expanded view would be relevant.

Another thing on the resolution issue is I remember reading an article about the topic and I recall that it's actually even advised not to stream at 1080 unless you have Partner on Twitch or have some kind of advanced bitrate thing. Apparently if you put out 10,000 bits per second for a 1080 stream, the people watching the stream also need to be able to pull down 10,000 bits per second or they will suffer stutters and bad quality. This doesn't sound too significant but anyone watching on a phone or a weaker internet will probably struggle to get that number and for that reason I think a lot of streaming guides recommend 720.

I noticed on the YT video that at times the image was quite broken up. The 720 res didn't feel consistent.

I think this is partly also due to YT's control of the encoding processes. I noticed it too. Things did look blurrier than I seem to remember the Mixer stream looking. I've poked a few buttons so we'll see if this becomes any clearer on Friday. I watched Miko's stream and it definitely looked sharper than mine. If that fails I can consider also recording at possibly a higher resolution and then just having to upload the recording. This is a very un-optimal solution though. One of the biggest conveniences of streaming is not having to do all that video stuff to upload as well as not having it occupy my hard drive. It does seem like the recording would be the best way to go for 1080 footage

I also only just remembered an idea I think Grog had had about two people streaming and showing each other's. It wouldn't be too difficult to set it up to stream a Picture in Picture of another stream. I'm not sure if this would impact the bandwidth a lot or not. It would also be possibly useless depending on how small the added frame was going to be. Especially if its my stream in only 720 and then its pushed into a small box it might be hard to understand what's happening there. But it might be wort a try and could be a fun thing, especially if we put Miko and I in a division or corps together then we'd likely be near each other and the expanded view would be relevant.

Did YT blocked your latest video, Ehey? Ridicolous.

Indeed it tells me its partially blocked for copy right. It seems to happen to every 4th or 5th video. I don't even know what countries it's blocked in. Its presumably for the music. It might even just be a singular song.